


Juno Steel and the Aktinovolic Atlas

by underwater_owl



Series: aktinovolia et al [1]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, Detective Story, Heist Story, Homme Fatale, M/M, Pining, or did he?, the one that got away
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-06-27 14:47:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15687567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/underwater_owl/pseuds/underwater_owl
Summary: Juno's busy at work defending the reputation of an auction house, when a memory walks into his office.Peter Nureyev is here as a client, with a case that Juno absolutely cannot afford to take.





	1. The Setting

Juno Steel stands on the one hundred and third floor of the Titan Hotel, and reflects to himself that they’re really going to have to clean the top of the dome if they insist on building these things so high up. The roofscraper is the tallest in Hyperion, brushing perilously close to the top of the habitat glass.

Plastic, Juno realizes, from this close up. This section of the Hyperion habitat dome is cruddy, ancient polymer coated with a century’s pollution. The air filters in HC work double time and still barely keep up with the smog. Most of it hovers several stories down below them, a murky cloud of exhaust obscuring what should be a majestic view. 

Goes to show you, he supposes. More is not always _more._

“The rooms below us have vidscreens programmed into the windows,” says Semkiu, from behind him, as though reading his thoughts, “each one can be programmed to look out over any number of attractive locales.”

James Semkiu, the fabled hotelier, stands at the head of the room while his PA brings Juno a glass of something amber with a pair of round, red stones in it. The frozen whiskey stones are shaped like Mars used to look, red and round and pocked with craters, absent habitation domes and all frontier.

The drink is good. The bottle probably costs more than Juno’s monthly rent. Hell, taking a room in this hotel would probably rent the place for a year. 

“The height matters, of course,” says Semkiu, “but only so long as you’re standing on the ground.”

Juno dislikes him nearly as much as he dislikes his fancy hotel, he realizes, with all the suddenness of a kick in the teeth. He dislikes him more than he usually resents his wealthiest, showiest clients. Semkiu is a smooth man, in an immaculate suit, with grey hair and a pair of mutton chops that Juno hopes aren’t about to cycle into fashion on Mars in the next few years. They probably are. Juno will never be able to forget that this man is where he saw them first.

There have been rumours circulating since this place went up about the amount the Jupiter Group had to pay for the building inspectors to overlook safety ordinances and construction standards. He’s not sure exactly why it has been illegal to build this close to the top of the city, but it sure isn’t going to be any more. With the gauntlet thrown down, anyone who’s anyone in high powered real estate is going to go up and up and up. The shadows cast on the rest of the city will get a little deeper, life in Hyperion will get a little darker. 

“Why am I here, Semkiu?”

Well, it’s not like he’s exactly got a reputation for sunny customer service.

“Because I’m going to pay you handsomely, Detective.” 

Just like that, the view of the city vanishes. Semkiu’s vidglass flickers seamlessly to life, blanking the city below them out and replacing it with their red corporate logo, H and C intertwined. It fades, and gives way to an advertisement for an antiques auction.

His assistant speaks up. The young man is immaculately dressed, with slicked back hair and a kind of vicious aura of competence about him that reminds Juno of… people who he would rather not think about at a job interview.

“The Jupiter Group and the Titan Hotel are thrilled to bring the Magnate Auction House to Hyperion City,” says James Semkiu, sounding glassy and bored and well rehearsed, “the most prestigious dealer the planet has been able to attract-"

“What with our reputation for slightly creative antiquing.” Interrupts Juno, earning himself a glance of amusement, tempered with maybe a little irritation.

The assistant recovers with only a tiny pause, mostly because he's waiting for his boss to stop chuckling at his expense.

“Jupiter has offered certain assurances. Namely, that we will provide exceptional accommodations for interstellar buyers of the highest caliber, that we will facilitate connections with the affluent among you, here in Hyperion, and we will see to it that none of the items are variously counterfeited, freshly stolen, cursed, or in any way biohazardous. Specifically, we would like no fresh bloodstains, please.”

 _Yeah,_ thinks Juno, regarding the vague curl of the man’s lip, _you might not have wanted to come to the old HC, then, buddy._

Evidently his tartness is toeing right up against the line, because Semkiu cuts back in.

“Thank you, Reginald.”

Reginald subsides and steps back, leaving Juno to direct his initial assessment to the boss.

“I don’t know if you quite understand the extent of the artistic culture here, Mister Semkiu. I can’t remember ever seeing a piece that wasn’t all of the above. In fact, hit all four and you can yell ‘bingo’ and you get a prize.”

“I’m perfectly aware, detective. And in response, I’d like to note that we really will pay you _exceptionally_ well.” There’s something slightly condescending about the way he says ‘exceptionally.’ “They payscale is simple. You're going to make double the amount our compliance team is being bribed. You will patch the holes that dirty money is going to create. You will be the third failsafe, Mister Steel, and I’ll be honest with you- far from the most impressive mechanism in place. That would be our own in house compliance, or the highly sought after external auditor we've contracted."

The screen changes again, the logo for _that_ company coming up. Juno knows them. You'd have to work to find someone in their ranks to pay off. Could be done, but it'd take effort, which means that Semkiu has done his homework. 

"You will keep your involvement with our company quiet. You will triple check the work that compliance and auditing have double checked. You will be on hand the night of to improvise in case of any last minute emergencies. You will identify for me anything that needs bringing to our intention. I don't necessarily believe you're better than them, Mister Steel, but I do know that among certain circles you've developed a reputation for unimpeachable integrity.”

That and a cred will get him a one-cred drink at the Pour and Floor, but when Reginald presents him the cheque for the first fifty percent upfront, he remembers those thoughts he’d been having about that year’s rent at his current apartment. 

James Semkiu has only been on Mars for a few months or so, but he sure has worked out what makes the world go round. Bribes, flattery, and incentivizing your staff to turn one another in and yeah, he might stand half a chance of making sure the fakes he get are good enough that they never get found out.

Still, Juno leaves the meeting feeling pretty good. He takes the elevator all the way back down, to the glittery lobby, out into the streets, and treats himself to a cab ride back to the office. After today, he can afford it.

Yeah, normally Juno doesn’t love this kind of work. He’d much rather be getting kittens out of trees for little old ladies than doing anything for the likes of a flashy import like the Jupiter Group. But money, and a little flattery never hurts. _Unimpeachable integrity,_ that’s him. 

Of course, it’s more than that. It’s that good old rent cheque. It’s Rita’s salary. It’s a bit of breathing room. It’s one night real night of work, one job, that will mean he can turn down a dozen crummy ones behind it without even the littlest bit of guilt. And best of the best, even if he's working for scummy people, he's not actually doing scummy work for them. He's _preventing_ fraud, theft, and black market reselling of stolen property for once, not turning a blind eye to it.

Juno Steel is accidentally developing a bit of a niche. The thing is, he knows a thing or two about stolen art and artifacts, and has had a little bit of good luck lately in busting up a distribution network, getting handcuffs on a particularly prolific thief. It turns out a couple of jobs working hand in glove with a master of the craft will offer you insight into industry tips and tricks.

As though just the thought of Nureyev is enough to do it, the car hits traffic, and a grate belches a cloud of pea soup smog down at them. Perfect. It’s been nearly a year since he walked out of that hotel room, a year and a half since he’s seen hide or hair of the other man, and just- yeah, that’s pretty much perfect. 

While they’re still stop-and-go in traffic Reginald the PA emails over a couple of encrypted dossiers. They download slowly onto his communicator, loading up information on the registered sellers, the items due for sale, the guest list. They are, in order, extremely impressive, astonishingly valuable, and ludicrously exclusive. They don’t throw any red flags up for him, but he fires them off to Rita for a look, then hops out of his ride early to walk the rest of the way back to the office.

By the time he gets there the iron band of panic has eased just slightly enough that he doesn’t give up for good when he finds the elevator out of service.

Still, he’s more than a little winded when he finally makes it up to the office, and straight into a barrage of questions.

“Mista Steel! How’d it go? I got your email- so you took the job, then? What was it like? Did you yell at him too much?”

“You say that like you have no faith in my professionalism, Rita.”

“Well, boss, it’s not so much that I don’t have faith in it, as that I-“

As entertaining as the explanation is likely to be, Juno forestalls it by dropping the cheque onto the desk for her to snatch up. Her eyes go just wide enough for him to hope he didn’t gape like that when Reginald handed it to him.

“Boss!”

Rita’s shout nearly rattles the windowpanes, and Juno breezes past her and towards his office. Usually, she’d be together enough to give him a little bit of warning about a client waiting in his office. Rita can be delinquent, but usually protects him faithfully from strangers, being well acquainted with Juno’s professionalism after all.

Then again, as far as Rita is aware, Agent Glass is a colleague, not a client. Juno smells the cologne before Nureyev turns away from the window.

Everything that scent used to do to him, it still does. He's never been able to forget that smell. He's never been able to forget the sound of his voice.

“Hello, Juno.”

It never rains but it pours.


	2. The Case

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter Nureyev is here as a client, which isn't a thing that could ever go well for anyone.

“Hello Juno.”

Peter Nureyev is just as tall as he was when he left, and his voice is just as deep, and Juno’s stomach still manages the exact same somersault it always does whenever the other man says his name.

God help him, he resents him for it, and for being here, and for being everything he can’t allow himself to have.

He closes the door behind him, thumbs the lock, to make sure Rita doesn’t decide this is the time to burst in on them and join them, and swallows once, before he can speak.

“Nureyev.”

He shoots for cool, and hears himself miss by a mile or so. The cars are unusually loud outside, and he realizes it’s because the windows are open. Juno hadn’t even realized they _could._ The lights in the office are off, so he reaches for the switch by the door, and doesn’t miss the fact that when he flicks it on, Nureyev steps hastily out of the windowframe. In fact, he goes so far as to reach up, and flick the curtain shut.

Well, it was never going to be something easy, was it? Without needing to be asked, Juno flicks the light back off, and moves in the familiar dark to go pour himself a drink. He has a feeling he’s going to need it.

“I’m very sorry to intrude, Juno,” Nureyev is saying, doing each of the curtains in turn. His tones are purely measured, utterly pleasant. “And I do apologize for the dramatics, but you see, I’m here to engage you in a professional capacity.”

Two glasses. Quite unconsciously, Juno pours for them both, then comes over to him, offering out the whiskey in the half dark. It gets a little harder, when Peter actually turns to face him, addressing him as more than an afterthought. It’s lucky their fingers don’t brush when he takes the glass, because all at once Juno feels like he might be scalding to the touch.

He’s can’t admit to himself that he’s missed him. So, he doesn’t.

“No.”

He has good reasons, for refusing him point blank. When they’ve partnered up before, Juno has always ended up dragged along- barely keeping up, in fact, in over his head. Traditionally, this has hurt one or both of them.

“No?” Asks Nureyev, taking the glass out of his hand, and taking a sip, a rather bigger one than Juno usually remembers him taking. “But you don’t know what it is I’ve come to ask you.”

“It doesn’t take a private eye to detect it isn’t going to be good news, Nureyev. Whatever you need, I’m not the right fit for it. Call it- lack of objectivity.”

“Juno-“

He’s just opening his mouth to tell him to save it, when he catches a motion. The finest tremor going through one of those fine fingered hands, barely visible in the dark. Probably Juno would miss it entirely, if it weren’t for the enhancement of that new cybernetic eye.

“I know you have every right to be angry, but please listen.”

Then, Peter Nureyev says probably the one and only thing he could say to stop Juno in his tracks, make him sit up straight and hear him out. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, not after the rigmarole with the lights and the curtains. 

“Someone is trying to kill me.” 

\---

They sit together in the dark, and Peter tells him the whole story.

“It begins on Moratuwa.”

Moratuwa, Nureyev has talked about before. In the dark of the Martian birthing room, they’d sometimes whisper into the night- well, mostly Juno lay on his back in shock and let Nureyev paint him pictures of the places in the universe he’d never been. 

Juno’d been lying with his head on Nureyev’s leg, while he used a little of their precious drinking water daubing blood away from his eye. He remembers Moratuwa, home of violet foliage under a turquoise sky. Pools of blue water like crystal. Untamed jungles that echo with the cries of birds, and pollen in the air with a natural, mild, psychotropic effect. How Peter’s voice had nearly conjured the feeling of humidity on his skin, the scream of a hunting beast in the dark.

“Extremely popular spot to own a vacation home, for the ultra-wealthy,” says Nureyev, tonight, in his office, skipping the romance and confining himself to this professional assessment. Juno takes this to mean it’s not a bad spot to burgle the silverware in all those tastefully appointed, empty status-properties.

Nureyev nurses his drink, sipping slowly for a moment, before he continues. 

"There's also a famously cursed temple. Original colonists built it smack in the middle of some kind of dreadfully radioactive anomaly. Some of the most astonishing original human diaspora faith-based architecture you've ever seen, and if you spend more than twenty minutes there or forget to take your preventative pills you cough up blood for a week.”

His eyes have slipped shut while he speaks, another familiar habit Juno struggles to shove out of his thoughts, refocusing in a hurry on what he says next.

"I collapsed that night at the hotel with radiation injury to my thyroid gland. Some kind of error at the pharmacy with the iodine I was so careful to take. Help was right on-hand, the locals are very familiar with the symptoms, but-" He takes a sip of his drink, supremely unconcerned with being poisoned, for all that, "-alarming, nonetheless. I would almost have been prepared to chalk it up to a mistake. A near miss with a devastating accident. Those long odds catching up with me at long last. Except I've had six near misses in the last two weeks. Brakes failing in cars, shuttlecraft doing their best to fall out of the sky, plausible and unlikely contaminants turning up in food and drink…”

The feeling that Juno always associates with Nureyev, a band going tight around his chest, returns in full force. Nureyev breaks for a sip of the liquor, and almost without thinking, he reaches out and plucks the glass right out of his hand, and tips it into the potted fern Rita has optimistically placed on the corner of his desk.

Nureyev makes an absolutely unfairly wounded sound as the drink is lifted away, but he pushes on.

“I did the only sensible thing and used every trick in the book I know to shake a tail, then bolted to a safehouse. I was there one night, before I experienced power failure while I was sleeping. On an ice planet, mind you, with a non-breathable atmosphere."

Where the heating and oxygen going down can turn into a sticky situation in a matter of minutes, and you’re as likely in those circumstances to just not wake up as you are to be able to get to a shuttle and get out.

"And so you see my problem.”

When the story ends, Nureyev is slouched down in his chair, long legs stretched out, feet crossed at the ankle, eyes shut again. Only belatedly does Juno clue into the fact that the man is absolutely, utterly exhausted.

He draws in a shaky breath and tries to decide what the reasonable thing is to do. What would he ask any other client?

“Do you have any enemies you can think of who’d have reason to want you dead?”

One of Nureyev’s eyebrows creeps up towards his hairline, conveying neatly that they both know the answer to that. Juno lets out a long sigh and tries to come up with a better question.

“Top contenders?”

“Yes.” Says Nureyev, not entirely to his surprise. “I have a few names, and I’ve been working on narrowing them down.

“I’ll need you to tell me everything.”

There’s another one of Peter’s long silences. Juno had forgotten this habit of his, this allergy to direct answers.

“Look, Nureyev, if you want me to take the case we’re not going to be able to work like you usually do. I put up with a certain amount of flying blind and following in your footsteps. But if theft is your bag, investigations are mine. And that means you can tell me _everything,_ or you can show yourself to the door.”

Nureyev raises his hands, peaceably, and continues the story, perhaps a little more frankly than before.

“When we began our last adventure, you, me, and Madam Miasma, I invited a little trouble down on myself. You already know I’d been working on the side for Valles Vicky, you won’t be shocked to learn that I had a few other active contracts. Most were professionals, who understood that I’d been unavoidably detained. The experts in this line of work are all dispassionate by nature, and I do try to work with the best. One or two were disgruntled, and I mended fences by forwarding the work to some of your up and coming local talent and covering the kids’ fees myself out of pocket. The clients get the work done for free, the next generation gets a modest wage and a little notoriety under their belts, plus a valuable set of contacts.”

“Aren’t you the good samaritan.” Juno is pinching the bridge of his nose, here. The shrug Nuruyev gives him, languid and full bodied, does nothing to settle his nerves.

“When you can leave everyone happy, Juno, you last a lot longer in this life.” And, perhaps realizing the irony of what he’s said, he winces. “Exceptions prove the rule. There was one job which has continued to go unfulfilled. This is for a multitude of very good reasons that have variously to do with terrible luck, and a legitimately difficult extraction, one requiring an actual master thief.”

“And your ex-client has taken this all a little personally?”

“It seems so.” Sensing, perhaps, that Juno isn’t going to be satisfied with this answer. “It depends how thoroughly her reach extends to Mars. There are others, but none who I believe would be in a position to get at me in Hyperion. I need you, Juno to keep me alive here while I work out if she’s still trying to kill me. I haven’t slept in a very long time.”

And then, while Juno’s heart is constricting in his chest, and he wants to reach out and touch his unsteady hands he feels himself struggle to swallow, Nureyev throws a metaphorical rock through the plate glass window of the moment.

“And then if it’s her, I need you to help me break into Dark Matters HQ.”

 _Ladies and gentlemen, Peter Nureyev._ The man who he is never, ever going to be able to be with. Juno lets out a long breath, aware that the silence is stretching, and that the thief has opened his eyes back up and is watching him.

What is the good thing to do? The professional thing to do? What do people _usually_ do when they have a conflict of interest in the form of a client who they’re torn between wanting to bite in frustration and wanting to beg them to bite back?

“I’ve got a colleague.” Says Juno, heavily. “A woman who’s honestly a lot better at this than me, Nureyev. I’m going to get you in touch with her, she’s who you need to be working with-“

But Alessandra, although objectively the right solution, he’s sure, is apparently the wrong answer as far as Nureyev is concerned. His expression hasn’t changed one bit, except he’s getting back into the suit jacket that Juno hadn’t noticed he’d gotten out of, and he’s getting to his feet, offering up his blandest, most absent smile, the face Rex Glass turns on obstacles.

“Shouldn’t have troubled you,” he’s saying, on his way to the door in an elegant glide that Juno has to jog to catch up with, damn the man’s stride. 

“Nn- Glass, come on, you know it’s not appropriate for me to- Rita, I need Alessandra Strong’s contact information, right now, please, just- _Glass!”_

Rita, who’s already in the hallway ahead of them, packed up and ready to go for the night, objects loudly, and over Nureyev’s quiet, somewhat inane reassurance;

“I’ll call her, then, I’m sure anyone you vouch for is a professional I can trust.”

The elevator has already been called, but Nureyev mashes the button a second time anyways, then a third. His pulse ratchets, partially due to Rita’s _but Mista Steel_ in the background, and something about needing to get _home_ already, and her soaps. But the thing that raises Juno’s blood pressure is what a bad liar Nureyev manages to turn into when it suits him.

“Look, you want me to believe this threat is real, you can’t just passive aggressively agree with me. If you’re taking this seriously and it isn’t just some bid to drag me into another one of your schemes- need I remind you that the last one was all fun and games until someone literally _lost an eye-_ “

He regrets saying it the moment it’s out of his m outh. The elevator doors slide open, and Juno reaches out, catching Nureyev by the arm, holding him back while the lift Rita called closes. Juno realizes he hasn’t heard her cursing from the office in the last half minute or so, and spares a glance to see her standing unobtrusively in the doorway. Presumably that’s Alessandra’s business card she’s holding. He doesn’t want to think too hard about the stricken look on her face, the way she’s seen them standing here together.

“I know, Juno.” Says Peter, as the elevator doors chime, and slide closed. “I’m not- I’ll take her number. I know I’m not being fair to you at all, but there’s a good reason why I really need take care of this on my own.”

So much for that promise he’d extracted from him to tell him _everything._ Juno is about to complain, when Nureyev takes the wind right out of his sails.

“I owe you an apology for coming here.”

“Glass-“ says Juno, much more quietly, over the thunk and rattle of elevator machinery climbing upwards, feeling his heart surge into his throat, “-wait, I-“

“No. I offered you the choice, and you made it. I respect-“

“Glass, _shut up.”_

Peter glances over at him, sharply, obviously not impressed with hearing his big moment interrupted. Juno cuts him off before he can complain.

“The elevator’s climbing.”

An incredulous look, in which he doesn’t get it, and Juno is sure in the split second before it happens;

“Rita hit the down button.”

Then the cables that had been lifting the box that should have been descending snap, and there’s a sudden rush at the doors, of a metal box like a coffin plummeting past them from the top floor. The crash when it hits the ground showers dust out of the doorframe, and the degree of incredulity in Nureyev’s expression increases substantially.

Rita, behind them, shrieks. To her credit it’s more in rage than it is in terror. It isn’t lost on Juno for a heartbeat that she should have been riding in that machine right along next to Peter, would have been if it weren’t for the card slipping from between her fingers. His vision literally goes red, and for once it isn’t because the eye is giving him trouble. 

Juno reflexively tightens the grip on Peter’s elbow, though he doesn’t seem to be trying to escape.

“Rita, come with us. We’ll get you home safely. Don’t come back into the office until you hear from me. Agent Glass and I are going to be working together for the foreseeable future.”

Two nights before the biggest job of his career as a PI is supposed to take place. Mister Semkiu will just have to hold his horses. Juno Steel is apparently teaming up with Peter Nureyev _yet again_. First an ancient death mask that inadvertently killed a man and got the wrong person thrown in jail, then a spectacular weapon that cost them both weeks in hell and nearly destroyed an entire planet.

Third time’s a charm, right?


	3. The Ruse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock Holmes once lit a house on fire to prompt Irene Adler to run for a hidden letter.
> 
> Juno Steel wishes he could just burn down this building. Does that count?

“You know, the many times over the years I’ve pictured you putting handcuffs on me, the fantasy never went at all like this,” murmurs Nureyev, as they take the front steps to the Dark Matters building.

“Shut up, Glass,” Juno answers, and tightens his hand around the connecting joint on the cuffs. Knowing him is like walking through a tourist trap. If you don’t keep a hand on your wallet (or in this case, your prisoner) you’re going to lose it.

The way he chuckles as they take the last few steps makes Juno push him forwards, walking his captive out in front of him.

“Dark Matters HQ,” says the polite, chiming voice on the landing, as several automatic blasters unfurl, pointing automatically at the pair of them, “please identify yourselves, or prepare to be incinerated.”

“Juno Steel, detective, here to turn in fugitive Rex Glass?”

There’s a single brilliant flash of light, that makes Juno curse and reach up to press the heel of his hand against the newer eye. Sudden shocks of bright light still send the thing a little wonky, will for a few months more, or so say the doctors. Nureyev observes, but wisely resists the urge to comment, while Juno blinks the stars away and waits for the guns to draw back and someone to let them in.

Instead of retreating, the doorbell grows about eight more arms, the usual pistols joined by guns that look like they could drop a charging mastodon with a single shot.

“Remain still.” Chimes the voice, dreamily, and Nureyev smiles and does just that, albeit for one single, wry chuckle. 

Juno shoots him a quizzical look, and he explains;

“One always likes to make an impression.”

Eventually a door slides up and open, and Juno breathes out, guiding his captive in and through into a large, marble lobby.

“Swanky,” says Juno, under his breath, and meets the eyes of the uniformed agent leading the pack charging down the steps at them.

“Hello, Marsden,” says Nureyev, still in that self-satisfied, dreamy tone from the doorstep, “nice to see you again.”

“Rex Glass,” says the woman, “or should I say, _Kim Marquis._ ”

“Should you?” Wonders Juno, not expecting a response, and not particularly surprised to be nudged aside. The cuffs unclick from around Glass’s wrists, and the agent replaces them with something black and elastic looking, binding his wrists closely. The material crystalizes in place and Juno resists the urge to gulp.

Hopefully the other man knows what he’s doing.

\---

The Aktivolonic Atlas is a name Juno has heard before. It’s the kind of thing that brushes up against the back of the mind, a word that sticks in the brain, even though it never manages to be quite relevant enough to look up in earnest.

“It’s an old collected resources. Half atlas, half almanac, assembled by the original colonists, back when space was still the wild west and the exchange of freedom was scattershot and democratic.”

Maybe it’s Juno’s imagination, maybe it’s because it’s actually the first time they’ve really been able to talk since Juno took the sneak peek into Nureyev’s head, but every so often he thinks he catches a glimpse of the child he was. The little boy in him, who still believes in the possibility of something revolutionary.

“Nowadays all that information is tightly controlled. Recorded, redacted, parceled out in increments, at a price, Juno. All I do is challenge the distribution structure a little. Why should Dark Matters own this idea?”

Nureyev never said, but Juno is dimly aware that the anomaly on Moratuwa is one piece of this secret that he’s trying to free. Juno doesn’t have any background whatsoever in those kinds of temporal-spatial tears, but he’s aware that they have their own little cult following. 

Mostly the study of the fabric of reality seems to attract technical nerds and visionaries, or opportunists eager to sell to the zealots. Nureyev, Juno has the sense, is a little bit of each of the above.

They talk about it in a hotel room. Nureyev has paid cash up front for one of those new Jupiter Group tower rooms, not so ritzy as the Titan itself. The man hasn’t lost his taste for luxury. 

This room is actually more to Juno’s tastes than his own. It’s done up as a modern reinterpretation of an old Earth classic, with gleaming wood and brass fixtures. The walls are papered, the throw rugs are shag. There’s a minibar, with a good collection of booze, and Juno goes to pour them both a drink. Nureyev looks dead on his feet, but and Juno has a few questions for him before he can sleep.

“So what does your client want with the atlas?”

“Haven’t the faintest,” says Nureyev, and shrugs off the dark look Juno gives him. You’d think the man would have learned his lesson about completing vague orders for shadowy billionaires with interests in the ancient and the eldritch. “Don’t look at me like that, Juno. Do you trust a collector of curios less than you do the shadow organization that pulls the strings behind half the galaxy?”

“Yeah, actually. I’m no fan of Dark Matters, but on a case by case basis I’d take them over the Martian elite just about any day of the week.”

“You have this peculiar habit of talking about your clients and mine as though they aren’t exactly the same pool, you know.” Nureyev murmurs, as he sits on the edge of the bed, taking off his earrings one by one and resting them lightly on the dresser. 

“It’s what we do for them that’s different, Nureyev. I uphold the law, you break it.”

“Oh yes. You _upheld_ the law beautifully the time you proved Min Kanegawa’s new lawyer was being blackmailed into selling her secrets to their closest competitor. Or tell me about the time you got hired to settle the paternity of that soap opera starlette’s twins and discovered, what was it, that _both_ children had different fathers, and neither DNA test had been faked?”

“Are you making a bid at the moral high ground while simultaneously admitting that you snooped through my files while Rita let you wait in my office?”

Nureyev shrugs, and pulls his glasses off, and changes the topic back to the Dark Matters security system, and what exploits they’re going to take to hack through it. Juno allows the clumsy topic change. This isn’t a fight he has any interest in losing.

After they’ve run through the plan backwards, forwards, and inside out, Juno finally shuts the conversation down. Nureyev is on his third badly muffled, jaw-cracking yawn, and submits with surprisingly little objection when ordered to _get some sleep._

Juno sits against the headboard on one of the twin beds and studies blueprints for the Dark Matters headquarters. The paperwork is so secret he could probably legally be shot on sight just for having seen them. It makes him wonder what other goodies Nureyev picked up while he was still Rex Glass. He reads over some of those notes by the soft amber light of the desk lamp, while the other man gets the first rest he’s had in a very long while.

Seeing Nureyev sleep brings back complicated memories. They’re more to do with the Martian tomb than they are the last hotel they shared, and Juno considers that a small mercy. If he were thinking about good times right now he’d probably be trying to climb off the balcony, twenty fifth story and all. Juno gives up the pretext of staring into blueprints he knows by heart, and examines Nureyev’s sleeping features. 

His face is different. It’s probably the sleepless nights, the soft bruises they’ve left underneath his eyes. Juno thinks he can see another crows’ foot or two. If asked, he wouldn’t be able to place Nureyev’s age to within a decade, but he knows every shade of pain that face can carry. Nureyev isn’t anywhere _near_ his breaking point, but he is hurting. He shifts in his sleep, brow furrowing a little deeper, and Juno wonders what he’s doing, out there chasing down scars in the fabric of reality.

Whatever he wants this book for, whether it’s actually to settle this old debt with an ex employer, or for something more convoluted, they’re going to have to work like hell to get it. The Dark Matters approach to security is a rotating network of safes, unmarked, that require authorization to access. There’s no way to differentiate which one is which if you’re not an active employee.

That’s as far as Juno can allow that thought to take him. He reaches over, grabs the lamp cord, and tugs the brass chain just once to put out the light.

\---

The Dark Matters security control room is quiet this time of night. It’s around four in the morning, but even so, the skeleton shift are all clustered around Juno and Marsden, peering together at a bank of video monitors.

One of the video screens shows an image of a lazy looking Peter Nureyev, aka Kim Marquis, aka Rex Glass. He looks poised and calm; the image is small enough that you can’t see those dark circles at all. 

Juno can’t help but notice that his wrists are still bound up tight behind his back.

“Glass and I go way back. I'm working for the Jupiter Group right now,” explains Juno, to the woman in charge, “trying to get an item onto an auction registry. Turns out the book in question is still registered to you all. He was using ID from one of the registered Dark Matters representative sellers, presumably stolen. It would all have checked out perfectly if the person who turned up at the would-be-sale weren’t little old me."

“What was he selling?” Asks Marsden, looking a little shell-shocked now that she doesn’t have to be furious and composed in front of the man who she clearly thinks she’s successfully unmasked at being Kim Marquis.

The man who yawns once, on camera, readjusts, and settles in.

“The Aktivolonic Atlas.”

“Impossible,” snorts Marsden. She’s a broad woman, built sturdy, dressed in classic Dark Matters black, bristling with straps and packs and holsters. She wears her dishwasher blonde hair in a neat bun and has an air of profound sensibility to her, plus a certain indignation, as though she doesn’t appreciate this change in the plans of her well-ordered day. 

Juno feels for her, he honestly does.

“And yet it’s sitting in the Magnate Auction House stores as we speak. You don’t know those people, lady, they’ve got auditors _and_ compliance _and_ an external contractor doing their vetting. Call them and ask about me, they’ll tell you I work for them.”

“We already are,” she promises, and gets to her feet, touching a fingertip to her ear in the unconscious gesture of people wearing headsets across the ages. He has no doubt that Reginald is fielding a call at this very moment.

“While you do that,” proposes Juno, “why don’t you take me to where this book is supposedly stored? I can tell you if what you’ve got on hand is a forgery. If we do it _now,_ you can have some answers on hand before Agent Wire turns up to talk about all this.”

Juno feels a little pleased, _proud,_ even, on Sasha’s behalf that this is the response her name provokes. Marsden quails, visibly, openly, and reacts to the invocation of her boss by getting to her feet and leading the way.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise,” says Juno, conciliatory, as they head together down the hall, “he worked here for how long? Who knows what he had a chance to smuggle out the door when he was still working here?”

“The thought is truly terrifying,” admits Marsden, and then when Juno glances back at him she elaborates, “I trained with Glass.”

That’s all she’ll say on the matter. Which is a good thing, too, because Juno can feel himself inclined towards liking her, and he wouldn’t want to feel too guilty about what’s going to happen next.

Marsden uses her authorization code to pull up the number of the locker that has the Atlas. She leads them down the unpassable hallways, correctly identifies the unmarked container that is doing such a good job of containing. She provides just the right codes to disarm the explosives that _should_ detonate the safe if it’s disarmed incorrectly, and she very helpfully lifts the atlas up out of its’ container.

“How do you think he got it out of there?” She asks, and wonders; “It's absolutely identical. How is it possible that it’s this good of a forgery?”

“I’m curious to hear his explanation about that myself,” says Juno, cheerily, and then waits for the _stun_ blow to hit her. It comes right when Nureyev said it would, from the doorway behind them, blast coming down and from above. He steps forward and catches the agent as she pitches towards the floor.


	4. The Kiss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The break in to Dark Matters continues.

“Juno,” says Nureyev reproachfully, as Juno manages not to drop the stunned woman, and in the process sends the atlas skittering, “that book is priceless.”

The thief moves like a cat. He emerges from the panel in the ceiling, lowers him down gracefully, and lands on his feet with barely a whisper of sound. 

“And I should have just let the agent here wake up with a concussion, Nureyev?”

“Marsden? You’re underestimating how hard her head is, my dear. She can take the hit.”

Nureyev holds out the blaster he used to stun her, thrusting it into Juno’s hands, forcing him to give Marsden a bit of a bumpy way down after all. The thief picks the book up and runs his fingertips along it like it’s a ruffled pet, before tucking it reassuringly against his chest.

“Don’t you dare crack that spine,” Juno instructs, while he double checks the settings on the weapon. It’s not the kind he’d used, but it was the very best of the choices among the small arsenal Rex Glass had apparently taken the time to secret away in the ceiling while he worked here, “I’ve _seen_ what you get like when you’re reading.”

“Quite.”

But it’s too late, he’s already gone, just intending to peek, probably, but already absorbed in the first paragraph. Juno doesn’t ask how he slipped the unslippable cuffs. That he’s been preparing for this job for a while is obvious. All he’d been waiting for, he’d explained, was a second person who he could trust to ‘turn him in.’

 _“One page,_ ” Juno threatens, and then speaks into his communicator, “Rita, how are we holding up?”

“Looking good, boss. They haven’t noticed the footage loop in the cell at all. But I’d move in a hurry, if I were you. The moment they realize the person using this account shouldn’t be in their system, I’ve got three seconds tops before I’m kicked right out of here, and that’s if I’m lucky.”

“Got it. Nureyev?”

“Coming, darling.”

Juno feels his cheeks get hot, and he steps out ahead of him into the hall.

They make it about nine tenths of the way to the back exit recorded on the blueprints before someone sounds the alarm.

“Boss!” Yelps Rita, down her end of the line, as though Juno could have possibly missed the sirens that blare, the way the lighting in the hall dips to red. There’s a click and hiss, and a bad feeling develops in the pit of Juno’s stomach.

“Nureyev?”

“Juno?”

“Why is it that an uninfiltratable organization has a series of tunnels running through the ceilings above their holding cells, anyways?”

“Because the tunnels are supposed to run above the halls, Juno, and the last time we had a construction crew in here I added a few feet here and there on the plans they were working from.”

“Okay then. Nureyev?”

“Juno.”

“Why are there tunnels in the ceilings above the halls to begin with?”

He doesn’t get an answer from the thief, but he doesn’t really need it spelled out for him. The first form, sylphlike and shining, drops down out of the ceiling, knives for hands. He’s dealt with these bots before. He’s seen Dark Matters tech before, and this looks right up their alley.

Juno raises his blaster, and fires a volley at the first sentry, while Nureyev launches past him at the second. There’s a shriek of metal on metal, a knife going into neck joints, and then the deactivated chassis is flung at the third robot, smacking it and stunning it just long enough for Juno to manage the kill shot.

“I thought hall surveillance was supposed to be scrambled!” Yelps Juno, as the last one drops.

“It is,” says Nureyev, “but these don’t operate using the cameras. They’re wired to respond to unauthorized pressure on the floorboards.”

Unfortunately, there are more behind it, and more still behind _them,_ dropping down out of the roof around them like apples shaken from the branches of a tree on a windy day.

“New plan,” says Nureyev, and grabs him by the elbow, dragging him down a hall.

“This is a dead end!”

“On the official blueprints, yes.” Nureyev rounds a corner quickly enough that Juno’s feet skid a little. “Let’s just say I extended that creative remodeling to see to the installation of an emergency exit.”

“And you couldn’t have mentioned that _before_ we entered the most dangerous building in the city and you got thrown in the unescapable holding cell and I walked voluntarily into the impenetrable vault?”

“I didn’t want to use it if there were any other option, Juno. Once Dark Matters becomes aware of its’ existence, they’ll see to it that it’s sealed immediately.”

“So you were prepared to risk our lives on the basis of the fact that you might want to rob them again some time in the future?”

His voice is raising now, a slight note of hysteria, which Nureyev only makes worse by calling out an extremely cheery reply.

“Waste not, want not, detective!”

Juno isn’t sure if that’s exasperation, rage, or just his heart complaining about trying to sprint while carrying on a conversation. He lets the matter drop for now, huffing ever so slightly, and spins to hold the approaching defence systems back while Nureyev drops down to a floor tile next to an outside wall, and goes about doing something to open the illicit trap door.

Shot, shot, and shot- now that he knows the spot on their necks Nureyev plunged the knife, these things go down a little easier than he remembered, but they’re coming thicker and faster than he can keep up with.

“Jump, Juno,” says a voice near the floor, “I’m right here.”

He spares a single split second glance, taking in the dimensions of the hole, then fires one last time and leaps into the dark.

\---

Nureyev is a good catch, and Juno draws in a relieved breath against his chest as the hatch over their head snaps shut. They’re in a small, dark room, pressed close. For a dizzy moment everything is pitch black, and all there is in the world is the smell of that cologne and the sound of both their heartbeats.

A scuffling sound above them snaps Juno out of it.

“Just the defense system returning to storage.” Promises, Nureyev. “Now that we’re off the floor boards, as far as they’re concerned we don’t exist.”

He must have prepared for this, because he pulls a small flashlight out of his pocket and turns it on, spinning it around to light the way down a long black expanse ahead. It definitely leads away from the building. There isn’t raw sewage underfoot, for which he’s extremely grateful. Instead the stone walls are lined with wires and conduits, which squares with Juno’s mental map of the grid in this part of town. 

Nureyev leads the way, tugging Juno by the hand through the dark. It’s a short jog, more of a lope than a sprint, and then eventually, when no sounds follow them down into the tunnel, a brisk walk.

Juno’s communicator chimes, and Nureyev releases his hand, which Juno doesn’t particularly like, but takes as permission to answer the call.

“Boss?” It’s Rita, of course, sounding panicked, “Boss, I think they might be onto you.”

“We’re out, Rita.”

“Well thank goodness for that! The things I saw lurking around in those security schematics, Mista Steel, they’d turn your stomach. These people are serious.”

“You don’t say.” Says Juno, dryly. He can tell by the curve of Nureyev’s smile that he can overhear the whole call. Anyone could, with Rita’s phone voice.

“Oh! Oh, Mista Steel, I wanted to check in and ask how the other case is going. The one for the Jupiter Group?”

The reminder of tomorrow’s job irritates him a little more than it should. 

“Well, Rita, I’m currently breaking out of the most secure building in the entirety of Hyperion City, but in the spare time since I begun that little project, it’s been going great.” 

“I know that, boss, only they called just now to congratulate you on your good work and said they’d received a call that you’d been checking around on their behalf, and it’s not a lot of clients who’re willing to pay the whole gig up front like that, so I’d hate for you to make a bad impression. I’ve been looking over the lists they sent along and thought when you were done there you could to, so as they’ll know that-“

“That wasn’t the full payment, Rita. That was the first half.”

“Half?!”

Taking this as his cue that the call can officially be over, Juno hangs up the communicator. They’ve come to a small flight of three stairs, leading up to another panel. Nureyev makes no move to activate it, shaking his head, offering;

“A few more minutes, for a little of the heat to pass. At this point the search times will be right on top of us; a little longer and they’ll fan outwards, and spread themselves just thinly enough that we can slip through the net.”

The tunnel isn’t quite so close, down at this end, but after all the excitement of the last hour, it’s a little jarring to be standing here next to him in the dark. It doesn’t feel right to sit, so Juno leans up against one of the tunnel walls, and tries to gather his thoughts.

Nureyev is the one to break the silence first.

“I didn’t know Jupiter Group had come to Mars.” He manages to pack an awful amount of concentrated politeness into the statement. When Juno doesn’t answer, he expands. “They’re from Brahma too, you know. Despite what their PR would tell you, they do _not_ have an impeccable record that they like to brag about.”

Juno, who never seems to be able to resist any kind of bait with Nureyev, lately, feels himself bite back.

“They’re paranoid about Hyperion art thieves, for some reason. Apparently they haven’t bought into this myth that you’re robbing from the rich to give to the poor.”

“That’s not-“ Nureyev starts, then draws in a breath. Juno can see him composing himself, modulating his voice. “You know Juno, I do see you. Whoever your clients are on paper, I’ve known from the moment I met you that your function here was to protect those who cannot protect themselves.”

As far as taking the wind right out of his sails, there’s pretty much nothing he could have said that’d do a more thorough job.

After that one they’re quiet for a _good_ long time.

“So remember how we sat in my office and you said you’d tell me everything?”

“I didn’t actually say that,” defends Nureyev, lightly, “I just let my silence imply agreement.”

Juno opens his mouth to argue, and then groans when he realizes that this is, in fact, true.

“Well, I’m going to make you say it this time. I don’t think you know what it does to me when you heave me into these adventures and don’t tell me until the very last second what the actual plan is.”

That gets him a surprised glance. Honestly, it surprises Juno himself, just a little bit. Why is he doing maintenance on something that has already crashed and burned?

“I’m just saying,” says Juno, “I like to imagine that you think I’m a reasonably intelligent person, with a pretty good grasp of how this world work. I admittedly do a lot of my best work when I’m reeling in shock and totally unprepared, but if you met Juno ‘I have all the information in advance’ Steel, you might like him, too.”

The silence after this speech hangs a little long, and feels a little more profound than Juno ever really likes, but when Nureyev does answer it’s very nearly worth it.

“I’m sorry, Juno,” he says, voice a lot softer now. Maybe it’s just that Juno is getting used to the quiet underground, but now things feel close and strangely intimate. Just them leaning near to one another in the dark, the beam of Nureyev’s light directed at the floor. “It’s a terrible habit. It’s how I was trained. I really should know better, I didn’t like it then any more than you do now.”

Juno swallows, glad that Nureyev can’t see his expression. He remembers Mag, shocking a young Peter at the last minute, more than once. Uniforms he didn’t know they were going to change into, a city he didn’t know they were going to drop out of the sky. A lot of the resentment drains away at the realization, and he finds himself clearing his throat.

“Yeah, well. Work on it.” Which feels like a promise he’s not entirely comfortable making, but if he’s in for a chip he’s in for a cred. “And _definitely_ work on the thing where you risk my life for the plan without telling me in advance? You also have a bad habit of insisting I should trust you, then making me into collateral on a cardgame, or inviting me to read your mind so my face will bleed and you can use the distraction to slip out of our cell. It might be perfectly obvious to you that everything is going to be fine, but for those of us who aren’t the brilliant and prescient Peter Nureyev…”

Nureyev shuts him up with a kiss, and Juno’s ire melts away quicker than the ice on an asteroid hitting atmosphere. 

The kiss breaks while Juno is still trying to unscramble his thoughts, now clinging to Nureyev’s shoulders and breathing hard. They stay so close together that Juno feels the brush of his lips against his cheek when Peter sighs.

“Is this all right?” Peter murmurs, and Juno grabs him about the neck and kisses him again, desperate and a little dirty. Their teeth click, and Juno bites. Peter shoves, and Juno staggers backwards against the wall, his thief still right with him, still kissing him like he can steal the air from his lungs. 

Peter is a little handsy, always has been for as long as Juno has known him. His fingers steal under Juno’s shirt, which he swears was tucked in under a closed jacket. His thumb traces along a bullet scar that he apparently knows by memory.

He bites back, teeth sharp as ever, and Juno tastes just a little blood, and hears himself keen as Peter’s thumb shifts. His hand is down the front of Juno’s pants, thumb drawing along the pressure point at the top of Juno’s thigh. The one he’d once called _exquisitely sensitive._

Juno quakes for him, feels his treacherous knees threaten to buckle. Peter reads him easily, and pins him with his body, withdrawing his hand with a reluctant little moan that will echo in Juno’s mind until the day he dies.

“You’re not wrong.” Breathes Peter, voice pleasantly hoarse, when Juno is approximately thinking and breathing on his own again, properly. It takes a couple of seconds for Juno's brain to catch back up, remember that they'd been talking about disclosing secrets. Peter withdraws the rest of the way, turning back towards their exit and reaching, now, for a panel beside the door. He keys in a hasty code, and there’s a chip and then a series of pneumatic sounding clicks. 

“But like most resolutions, this one is going to have to begin with _next time_.”

The door opens, and Juno closes his eyes, shocked at the pain of the sudden flash of sunlight in his face, and reels at the shove that follows. He’s lifted, staggering, up the steps and into the alley. 

Peter Nureyev moves one hand to curl possessively around the side of Juno’s throat, thumb a firm pressure at the hinge of his jaw. The other hand is occupied with pressing the nose of Juno’s own blaster hard into his temple, shoving him out into the dawn light.


	5. The Mistake

“Rex,” says a very familiar voice “put the weapon down.”

“Agent Wire,” says Nureyev, and strokes his thumb lightly down the side of Juno’s throat. He feels himself _shudder._ He feels the intake of breath against his ear and is sure Nureyev felt it too, “I thought you weren’t going to be back for another few hours.”

“Marsden called me personally, Marquis. Your little virus blocked the automatic notifications that went out to the rest of the Exco, but you didn’t block communicator signals out of the building.”

In fact, Juno had raised that very possibility. Nureyev had assured him that it’d send up red flags and the risk of catching the wrong kind of attention was too high. Juno lets an exasperated breath, and ignores the soft _shush_ against his ear.

“Hi Sasha.”

“Juno.” She greets him, through greeted teeth, with a frustrated expression on her face that he’s come to expect while she looks at him.

“You’re looking well. Promotion suits you.” Juno tells her, while Nureyev walks him patiently backwards, step by careful step.

“Thanks. If you two idiots are expecting me to believe that Marquis is going to shoot you then you’re dumber than you look.”

“I’m not counting on you to believe I’ll shoot Juno, Agent Wire,” says Nureyev, politely, “I am very much counting on the fact that _you_ won’t.”

“Wow.” Says Juno, exasperated in the extreme now, and Nureyev slips his hand up to rest his palm firmly over Juno’s mouth.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You and I both know full well that I’m rated threat level nova. Your superior officers will have been perfectly clear on the protocol that requires you to shoot right through a civilian for the slightest chance to drop me. That’s Detective Steel here. Our civilian collateral.”

Even without knowing what he does about Dark Matters and their utilitarian take on the value of an individual human life when weighed against the greater good, Juno would be prepared to believe Nureyev. He sounds convincing, and he’s pulled Juno all the way back against his body. Even the blaster lowers away from his shoulder, as though to underscore that the play here isn’t _really_ that Juno is a hostage.

“It’s already too late. If you report what’s happened here, you’ll receive a disciplinary write up for hesitating even this long.”

Sasha breathes out through her nose, confirming this theory, even as she corrects him;

“You’re threat level is higher than nova. They’ve invented another escalated designation for you.”

“How flattering. And it’s-?”

“Classified.” Says Sasha, tartly, and lifts her own gun up, which Juno assumes is her way of ceding the argument. His heartbeat slows just a little, and Nureyev’s thumb repeats that same soothing brush along his jugular.

“I didn’t see you exit.” Says Sasha, confirming what Nureyev apparently already knows. “I’m going to find this tunnel and get credit for that, and for picking up Juno after you release your hostage. You will have been gone before I arrived.”

“Suits me fine,” says Nureyev, and Juno draws in a sharp breath through his nose to object. “You’ll look after the lady for me, won’t you Agent Wire? He’s had a long night.”

Eyes widening, Juno does about the only thing he can think of and bites Nureyev’s palm. Hard. Nureyev shakes him off, without a peep of complaint. Instead he leans in close and murmurs, just for Juno to hear. “Don’t complain, detective. Your instincts were right. You should have gotten rid of me from the outset. We can’t really trust each other anymore.”

Then he shoves Juno forward so hard that he staggers. Juno turns to whip around, but before he’s even done spinning he knows what he’s going to find.

Peter Nureyev is gone, and the atlas with him. Juno spins in a full circle, but there’s neither hide nor hair of him. He whips around, at the sound of running footsteps, and has a heartbeat to wonder why Sasha is sprinting at him and why she looks so frightened. He hasn’t seen that expression of protective panic in her face since they were kids and she was still picking him up off the floor whenever he got his heart broken.

Then he’s crushed against her shoulder, and someone sounds like they’re having an awful lot of trouble breathing, and it’s him. Sasha’s arms are tight around him, and they’re kneeling on the alley floor. Juno realizes Nureyev has never really left him for good before.

It looks like he’s finally getting a taste of his own medicine.

\---

Maybe Sasha feels a little bad about sending Juno into Nureyev’s orbit, back when all this began. He gets his debriefing in her office and not in a holding cell. Juno sits curled in one of her plush and lovely office chairs and holds a cup of tea in numb hands.

Sasha’s a good woman, so she slips a little whiskey into his second cup. All in all, she keeps him there well into the afternoon, grills him from start to finish on the story he’d given to Marsden when he brought Nureyev this.

Juno will say this for the man; Nureyev prepared him for this possibility thoroughly. He knows his version of the story backwards, forwards, and inside out, and can recite it in both directions with extraneous sensory details at each stage and a unique word count that suggests he’s recalling and not inventing when someone does the transcript analysis. Juno had scolded Nureyev for being paranoid, but now he wonders if this was the plan all along. 

“Which hotel did you leave him in?” She asks, at the very last, “The last time you saw each other, after Miasma?”

“The Dione? He picked it, it was near the hospital. I don’t think it matters, there’s no way he’d be crazy enough to go back there.”

“It’s fine. Just something I’m looking into with this Jupiter Group of yours.”

At the name of his other client, Juno’s eyes widen, and he looks frantically around for the time. Sasha reads the look on his face, and snorts, but ultimately lets him go. 

It won’t be the worst job he’s ever done on no sleep and a broken heart.

\---

Juno makes a quick stop at his apartment and cleans himself up as best he can. It’s a black tie affair, and he looks at and discards a slinky red dress that needs to be matched to heels. Although Juno has seen Nureyev manage a dead sprint in a pair of pumps, he isn’t nearly that good in them himself. This is a work occasion, and it’s easier to fight for his life in oxfords and slacks. Sure it’s supposed to be just a party, but when is it ever _just a party?_

Tuxedo it is.

He shows up for his start-of-program meeting with a harried Reginald, who approaches him across a marble floor with heels clicking sharply, and wants to know;

“Where have you been, Mister Steel?” But without waiting for an answer, he shoves a small device into Juno’s hands, and instructs him; “Put this on and follow me.”

‘This’ is a professional communications relay, the kind that slips into one ear and affixes a delicate fiber that leads to a discrete microphone. He’s read about this kind of gear but didn’t have access to it even when he was still with the HCPD.

Juno slips it into his ear, carefully, and follows in Reginald’s wake as he leads them into a backroom and to where the goods to be sold are each laid out on the table, being checked and double checked by Reginald’s minions. Guards stand to the side, tall and hulking.

“You’ve done good work, detective. We already received the call from your assistant about the atlas. The would-be seller set up a last-minute meeting this afternoon to present the book in question. Alas, they must have had word of your involvement, because they skipped their appointment. The police would have been there to greet them if they had. Now, I won’t presume how to tell you to do your work, detective, but we’re at the zero hour. If you can just see us through the rest of the night with no catastrophes…”

A harried looking woman in another ‘somebody’s PA’ suit rushes at them. Who know, maybe she’s Reginald’s. Maybe PAs get PAs at this level. She’s currently explaining something about a wine stain and the auctioneer, and Reginald is gone before the end of his own sentence, whisking off behind a curtain in a vanishing act that nearly rivals Nureyev’s. 

He leaves Juno standing behind him in the thick of the chaos, blinking in shock and trying not to let this news knock him completely off stride. Either this mystery woman for whom Nureyev stole the book moves awfully quickly, or she never existed to begin with.

It doesn’t matter. It’s all just a question of how _much_ of a fool he was played for.

The earpiece chatters, suddenly, activating and letting him in on the chatter of the rest of the support staff. A little fiddling and a few murmurs let him hone in on just the security channel, where the various members of auditing and compliance and straight up brute force speak quietly to one another.

Juno is outranked, outclassed, and out of things to do for the night. Worse still, he’s actively in the way, so he makes the decision to go out into the party and keep an eye out for trouble.

As these things go, it isn’t a bad party. There’s something a little mercenary about the attendees, the grim jawed and steely eyed elderly of Mars’s upper crust, peppered in with the occasional proxy buyer or staff member who keeps to themselves. People aren’t here to see or be seen, people are here to procure and spend.

Juno finds a drink and a corner to plant himself in, and watches the group settle into their seats, expensive paddles all too hand. A lady dressed in a sweeping fall of sapphire actually seems to have a pair of binoculars.

“Juno,” murmurs Peter Nureyev, right in his ear, and Juno jumps about a foot in the air and spills his glass of water all over his hands and the carpet. One of the waitresses looks over at him in alarm, and he winces, reaching up for his earpiece and moving to adjust it like it’s been turned up too high.

Reginald is making bland opening remarks now, and Nureyev speaks again.

“Juno, darling, I hope you can hear me. I went through quite a lot this afternoon to nab one of these headsets.”

“Glass?” He whispers and makes an apologetic face when the woman in front of him turns around to glance reproachfully at him.

“No, don’t speak. I can see video of you… did you know that nearly every inch of this hotel is wired for video surveillance? But I haven’t been able to patch into the audio fully. Nod if you can hear me, detective.”

Juno does as he’s told and feels a tiny bit of cowardly relief at the fact that he doesn’t have to figure out what to say in return.

“Good. I’m a few stories above you in one of these _decadently_ lavish rooms. I bet you hate this hotel, don’t you, dear Juno? The bed is the size of your office.”

The tender tolerance in Nureyev’s voice is almost more than Juno can stand.

“If you were up here with me- well, that isn’t really appropriate to say given what I came here to tell you. But I will tell you that I wish I could have coffee in this room with you in the morning. I wish I knew how you took your coffee. We never had a chance to lie in together, you and I.”

The regret in Peter’s voice makes his eyes burn. On stage, the auctioneer is quoting prices, the rapid-fire pattern skyrocketing numbers higher and higher. The object for sail is a chair, and it looks exactly like the one sitting in Juno’s office. Someone is going to buy it for more than he’s being paid for this already jaw-droppingly overpaid gig.

Which is, of course, the least of his problems.

“I dropped the book off before I came here.” Says Peter, quietly. “It hurt to say goodbye to the text, honestly, but my client was pleasantly surprised. Some ruffled feathers soothed. I can leave Hyperion City in one piece. There are so many worlds, Juno, with manifestations like the one on Moratuwa. All these closely guarded secrets kept for _years._ I wish, yet again, that I could convince you to come chase the stars with me.”

The microphone Nureyev speaks into is close enough to capture the sigh, soft as it is.

“You’ve been quite insistent that I tell you everything. Well, here’s my hesitation. That first night, in that hotel in Moratuwa, do you know what I found when I went back around to collect my things and check out?

Onstage, the chair is being wheeled out, sold, replaced on the block by a painting of a woman holding a strange hairy creature that could nearly be a cat.

“The room was under the name Peter Nureyev.”

The bidding starts, but Juno doesn’t hear the numbers this time, he doesn’t hear anything except the voice in his ear.

“The safe house that shut down on me had had the deed transferred into my name. The car with the cut brakelines, Peter Nureyev appeared on the registration. I was on the passenger roster of the crashing shuttlecraft. Peter Nureyev, Peter Nureyev, Peter Nureyev. It brought me to you, Juno. It brought me to you because if Alessandra Strong had been there to prevent another attempt on my life, she would have learned the secret. Not that I’d call it much of one anymore.”

The painting sells. One of auction aides is saying something to him now, at his side, and Juno strides away from her midsentence, heading for the double doors out into the hall. He sees Reginald glance up sharply from near the front of the room but can’t bring himself to care much about his job performance right now.

“I don’t blame you, Juno. Looking back, I wonder sometimes if I wielded my trust in you as a weapon. I extended it to you unasked, and then all but ordered you to trust me. But it’s never that simple, is it, darling? Don’t- please don’t look like that.”

In the hall, now, Juno looks up and around him, searching for the glint of a security eye overhead. He can’t see a single thing. However Jupiter Group hides their spyware, it’s just as advanced as the tech in these earpieces.

“I don’t blame you for telling a secret you never agreed to keep.”

“I didn’t!” Yells Juno, even though he knows Nureyev can’t hear him, even though it makes a waiter heading towards the ballroom with a tray laden with champagne flutes skitter away from him. He must look like a madman, shouting at the ceiling.

“Detective!” He hears from behind him, Reginald’s sharp voice. Juno ignores him, and rushes for the emergency stairwell. Staying upstairs, Peter had said. That means he’s not far. Juno will search every room on every one of these hundreds of floors, if he must, and to hell with whatever Semkiu or Reginald have to say about it.

In the stairwell, he loses Peter’s voice in his ear. The piece makes a fuzzing sound, beset by interference, but Juno doesn’t need it.

“Glass!” He yells, into the first hallway, “Rose!”

There’s no reply, but the hall is long, so he sets out into it. Nothing, no answer- when he screams again a couple of guests poke their heads out of their room, looking annoyed and bewildered, but none of them are the _right_ head.

They’re going to have to live with it. Juno knows, unquestioningly, that he did not give Peter Nureyev’s name up. What that mean, exactly, he isn’t sure, except that it probably eliminates this other client with the unfulfilled order for the atlas as the would-be assassin. Which _means,_ someone out there is still trying to kill Peter Nureyev, and the man himself is not going to see it coming.

Thinking fast, Juno grabs his earpiece again to adjust the channel. It still isn’t working, strangely, so he goes for his communicator instead, and patches himself through to the front desk of the Titan.

“Juno Steel here, security for the auction, I need you to run an urgent search of all registered guests at this hotel. The person we’re looking for checked in sometime in the last twelve hours, paid cash. How many clients do you have that fit that description?”

To the credit of the concierge, or maybe Reginald and the freedom he’s allowed Juno in this operation, the desk barely pauses before answering.

“Six, Mister Steel.”

“Their names?”

“Polly Scrivens, Martin Royle, Stephanie Shea, Elias Charleston, Viscount Lemieux and H Leung Gao.”

“I need the room numbers for the Viscount and Royle, _right now.”_

“Five hundred and seventeen, and seven hundred and six, Mister Steel. And if I may-“

Juno is already running for the elevator, but grunts.

“-there’s been a little unusual activity in the Viscount’s room, sir. A noise complaint has been called in. I was just about to dispatch security to go and check on the customer…”

But that’s enough for Juno. He hangs up the communicator unceremoniously and slams the button for floor seven.

The minute the elevator doors open, he hears someone calling his name. It’s Nureyev, there’s no question about that, but he’s never sounded like this before. At first, the words are barely audible, coming softly from the direction of 706, but as he gets closer he hears him properly. Nureyev sounds _terrified._

There’s a keycard waiting for him already in the door. Juno feels a moment of dread, is barely conscious of the thought that this is clearly a trap. Then Peter Nureyev cries out in pain, just once, clear as day, and Juno bursts through the door…

…into nothing at all. 

The room is peaceful and still. The lights are on, dim, and the furnishings are all immaculate. The windowpanes are set to be the night sky. The television set on the dresser buzzes faintly.

All at once, the static in his ear cuts off, and clear as day he has Nureyev again, asking, calm and perplexed;

“Juno? I’ve lost you, Juno, you’re not appearing on any of my feeds.”

It shouldn’t be possible. He’d heard him _right here._ He’d heard him at the end of his rope, at a breaking point, not mildly confused at a technological glitch. Something is very wrong.

Something about the image on the televison makes him look again, stepping forwards and frowning at the familiar shape there. What the hell is going on?

The stun bolt hits him like a ton of bricks, right in the back. Juno’s out before he hits the carpet.


	6. The Villain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who has really been trying to kill Peter Nureyev, and why?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: this chapter contains violence, and brief mention of a (staged) suicide. 
> 
> It generally has slightly darker themes than the rest of the fic, more linked to Peter Nureyev and the Angel of Brahma than the rest of the Juno Steel stories. Please be advised.

Juno wakes up slowly, and the first thought that filters in is that there’s been rather too many dramatic near-death experiences, blacking outs, and guns pointed at people in his life the last few days.

He’s distracted from his self-pity by Nureyev’s voice.

“Juno…”

It’s the call he heard while he was running through the hall, the confused, miserable sounding voice. Without a door between it and him, he can identify without looking that the sound is electronic.

Juno takes careful stock of his situation. He’s in what looks like a hotel room, but not the one he burst into at the Titan.

Like that room at the Titan, though, the lights are low, the tv is on. The image on screen matches what he saw when he was passing out, and more broadly speaking, matches the image of the room he’s in now. It’s not the Titan, it’s the Dione, the hotel room where he made a first start at that exciting, beautiful future that never was.

It looks considerably different this time around. Juno is tied up on an office chair in the centre of the room, which is much barer than it was the last time he was here. All the furniture has been stripped out, bed gone, paintings off their hooks. Even the dresser the TV was standing on has been moved away, though the screen is still sitting on the depression it left in the carpet. But the nails in the walls are in familiar wallpaper, the curtains blow in the wind where the balcony door is open. The view is just as it was that night. 

He cross checks a couple of features- the placement of wall sconces, the angle of the camera, with the surveillance video on the screen to try to pinpoint the location of that eye, but the content of the little home video neatly derails that train of thought. 

On the television screen in front of him is surveillance footage of Peter Nureyev, the morning after all those months ago. He’s wearing nothing but the bedsheet, and the bruises from their fight with Miasma.

It isn’t hard to guess that this is the audio track that lured Juno into charging 706. Onscreen Peter’s searching the hotel room, still pleading _Juno, Juno,_ like he doesn’t understand that he’s really alone.

Then, he’s sitting, crumpled over on the floor, face hidden in his hands.

It isn’t often you come face to face with the consequences of your choices.

“That’s in extremely poor taste.” Says the real Peter Nureyev, from off to the side of him and just behind. Juno cranes his head over his shoulder and spots the other man, bound the same way he is, hand and foot to a second chair. Nureyev has a bad bruise blossoming on one cheek, and the lens of his glasses on that side is spiderwebbed with cracks.

“How’d the meeting with the client go?” Juno wonders, trying to guess just how new that mark is. Nureyev shrugs- a slightly less elegant gesture than normal, given that he’s bound by the wrists, elbows, arms to a metal chair frame.

“Apparently not as well as I had initially thought.”

“She’s not the one who was trying to kill you.” Juno informs him, shifting his own chair; he’s tied down a little differently, wrists to the chair arms, ankles tied together. Probably Peter could slip bonds like this, but Juno certainly isn’t able to.

“Well, I see why you’re so good at your job, detective.” 

Juno laughs, softly, and only chokes the sound back at the furious expression that flits across Peter’s face. No- of course this isn’t funny to him.

“Sorry. Just thinking to myself, there’s no one else in the galaxy I’d rather be tied up in a creepily bare hotel room with.”

The hard, defensive mask that Nureyev’s wearing slips, ever so slightly. His expression crumples, for just a heartbeat, and for the first time somehow it permeates Juno’s thick skull that it _hurt_ Peter, when he left him.

“Touching, Steel.” Says a voice, from the doorway, neither Peter’s or his own. It sounds familiar, though the accent has shifted ever so slightly, away from the neutral and subtly… well, subtly more like Nureyev’s. “And good to see you again, Peter.”

Juno’s head snaps back around and he takes in Reginald, last name unknown, standing in the doorway. He’s holding a blaster. His voice, Juno puts the pieces together now, has more of a Brahma accent.

It’s where the Jupiter Group comes from, after all. Them and their carefully cultivated reputation.

“Kovalyov,” says Peter, sounding cool and aloof and for all the world like he’s run into an old acquaintance at a cocktail party, and not like he’s been kidnapped by a nightmare from his past, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Reginald-Kovalyov smiles, and Juno groans internally as the name root clicks, _regal, regicide, reg._ Close to Rex, in fact.

“You two used to work with each other, didn’t you?”

“Very good, Detective.” Answers Kovalyov. “But it goes a little deeper than that. Peter here is my brother.”

Juno reels, but Nureyev cracks in, quick as a knife and just as sharp;

“Hardly, Edward. At most what can be said is that we had the same teacher.”

“Who you killed,” Kovalyov reminds him, unaware, probably, of Juno’s little sneak preview into this chapter of Peter’s life. Peter opens his mouth to defend himself, and Kovalyov is across the room in a flash, with his gun at Juno’s temple. The chair spins easily, bringing Juno around to face Nureyev, whose mouth snaps audibly shut.

The look on Peter’s face is enough to make Juno bite his lip, for once in his life. The silence hangs, until Kovalyov breaks it, no longer shoving into Juno’s skin with the barrel of the blaster. He breaks back with a pleased chuckle, in the tone of a maniac who has an enemy right where he wants them.

“We’re all going to have a little talk.”

\---

“I waited two days, after you and Mag left me behind, before going for help from another resistance group. I was just a child, but the leader knew me by sight and the rest of the room knew Mag by reputation. So they took me in and listened to my story- that the two of you had gone up into the floating city to try to free us all, and that was the last I’d heard of you.”

Peter’s expression remains neutral, maybe touched with a small hint of disdain, but Juno cringes at the thought. 

“The state listed Mag among the dead right away. There wasn’t a grave, but it was a relief to at least have an answer. The resistance was a lot more worried about you. Interrogated, they said. Prisoner. They talked to me for hours about how much Mag told us. They had to proceed as though you might turn them all in. I insisted you were brave, and that you would never, but that wasn’t good enough.

“That was the end of my revolutionary career. What good is a thirteen-year-old boy to a group of people like that? I never had the chance you did, to take advantage of _years_ of his tutelage. That’s partially your fault, you know. If he hadn’t been so focused on you, he might have gotten me started earlier.”

“Oh yes,” says Peter, one eyebrow raising slightly, “the joys I hoarded to myself. The hours of knife fighting, the long runs in the cold streets at dawn.”

Juno starts to open his mouth to warn him, but he doesn’t need to. The blaster is back there at his temple, pressing hard. Apparently the vengeful maniac who’s kidnapped them doesn’t have a lot of tolerance for speaking ill of the dead. Kovalyov keeps on until he makes Juno wince, until he’s sure Peter gets the message, before he pushes on.

“They put me in one of the orphanages- luckily one in the packaging sector, not mineral extraction, or I’d be a very different kind of ghost from your past. I worked there every day until my eighteenth birthday, plotting ways to figure out what happened to you both.”

“You’re smart,” says Peter, conciliatory, trying to talk Kovalyov down, “you’d have taken the standardized tests on your birthday and been vied over by a number of employers, I’m sure. You had your pick, didn’t you? And you went with the Jupiter Group.”

It works, to a certain extent. The pressure of the metal eases back, as Kovalyov basks in the recognition. It doesn’t take a detective to see that as much as he hates Nureyev, he’s hungry for his praise.

“I did. And I leveraged that power into access to information. I was looking for your gravesite, yours and Mags’ both. If they hadn’t just incinerated you, that is. You were just a rumour among the rest of the resistance, a budding young fighter cut down before he had a chance, but I had to know more. I had to find you.

“Imagine my surprise when I found your name on the most wanted list. It was put up there a long time ago, to be sure, but the government of Brahma hadn’t killed you. You were still alive out there, somewhere, my dear big brother. That’s when I really began to apply myself, at the Jupiter Group. If you were still alive, somehow, I knew there must be a reason you hadn’t found me. That you must be readying some kind of coup or tremendous revolutionary strategy. No one else remembered the name Peter Nureyev as more than a fable, but I knew when you came back, I had to be ready. It took my sources two more years before they forwarded the security footage from that night.”

Juno draws in a hissing breath between his teeth, and Kovalyov seems to remember he’s there.

“He has told you, then, detective? You’re closer than I imagined you were.”

“That’s not what you think,” corrects Peter, quietly, but shuts up when Kovalyov cuts him off.

“You stabbed him in the back, Peter! Your own _family!”_

Confronted by the consequences of your actions, Juno had thought earlier. Seeing that tape on the screen had been bad enough. That’s nothing compared to hearing your deepest regret articulated and thrown in your face. Nureyev flinches like he’s taken a physical slap.

“He was going to drop the city out of the sky, Edward! Hundreds of thousands of people would have died! He was- I loved him. As much as you did. But he had gone too far.”

“He was doing what needed to be done!” Snarls Kovalyov. “You managed to stay out of the orphanages, but I was there for five years, Peter, and let me tell you- death is better than that. If a few thousand people needed to lose their lives to topple the people in power, then so be it. The death toll would have been high, but in the time since you’ve left Brahma, twice that many people have be killed by the Angels and in the factories. Mag was smart enough to know that. 

“I spent all those years thinking you were out there, getting ready to come back and save us all. You were just a spoiled little brat who threw away everything for picturesque courtyards and pretty harp music. You betrayed Mag, you betrayed Brahma, and you became _this?”_

Behind them, Juno hears the tape loop back on itself. The tense silence is broken by the soft cries of the Nureyev in the Dione a year ago. No one in the room has been breathing all that much, but Juno forces himself to now, and interjects, with a shaky voice;

“I don’t understand why it’s taken this long.” By the way they start, the two men have almost forgotten his presence. He swallows and forces his voice not to waver. “If you had us onscreen at the Dione, why didn’t you just- oh, shoot him? Then? Why play around with his name on record? Why all this now?”

“I can answer that for you, Juno, if I may,” says Peter, and glances up at Kovalyov, who apparently nods- though Juno can’t see his face from this angle. The tension in the hands on his shoulders eases somewhat, though, so asking for permission is apparently another good move on Nureyev’s part.

“He found this footage after the purchase of the hotel, not before. It was a breadcrumb in my trail, but not the end of it. He only found me by use of the facial recognition software in what must be the Juniper Group hotel on Moratuwa.”

This is a guess, by the way Peter looks up into Kovalyov’s face here, and a correct one, by the way he smirks.

“Which is where my problems began. Why he didn’t just shoot me, and why he always scrubbed my aliases off the paperwork are two questions with the same answer. He needed Peter Nureyev to turn up dead in some ignominious accident. Not a hero, not a martyr, just a man in the wrong elevator, on the wrong shuttle, prescribed the wrong pill.”

“Very good, Peter,” says Kovalyov, with a light in his expression that is frankly terrifying. Vindictive, sadistic, long gone over some edge, “you’re right. I have no tolerance for the idea of _revolutionary hero, Peter Nureyev._ But you left the best one off the list. ‘By suicide, after a lovers’ quarrel in a tacky hotel.’”

Juno feels all the blood drain away from his face.

“So much for employee pride.” 

It’s not his best line ever, but even so, it comes out sounding a tiny bit hollow. On the television behind them Nureyev calls out his name. Juno wishes he could throw something heavy right through the screen.

“Very well.” Says Peter, shakily, “But explain one thing to me. If you’ve cooked this up together, then why is Juno tied to a chair right along with me?”

“Cooked this up?” Juno asks, incredulously, right on top of Kovalyov, who wants to know-

“Together?”

“I know Detective Steel has a bone to pick with me, and has ever since I poisoned his mind, but I don’t understand how your relationship could have possibly soured so badly that he’s deserving of this treatment. He’s on your payroll, isn’t he?”

“Poisoned your mind?” Says Kovalyov, and Juno, for once in his god damned life, manages to keep his mouth shut. There’s nothing he can say that won’t cramp Nureyev’s style.

And boy, does the man have style.

“Detective Steel and I met while I was working procuring Martian technology for a woman named Miasma. I assume you researched me enough to- yes, good, you know the name. What you may not know was that Detective Steel here got rather in the way by swallowing a pill that was supposed to give the person who ate it the power to read thoughts.

“It was astonishingly effective, and so it became necessary for her to kidnap Juno, and work to reverse engineer the- medicine, device, what have you, based on what she observed in him.”

“I know all this,” says Kovalyov, and Peter nods, speaking a little more quickly, as though skipping ahead.

“The problem was, I’d been shadowing him for months, and developed something of a soft spot for Detective Steel. The same couldn’t be said in return; there are records of him turning me into the police, in handcuffs in his office?”

At last, Kovalyov moves away from behind Juno, into his line of sight. He’s drawn a remote from his pocket, and presses a button on it, cueing up footage of a hotel room, of Duke and Dahlia Rose sniping at each other while they prepare for bed in the room a few stories above Angstrom's poker table.

Rather, Juno sniping, Nureyev deflecting him with infuriating calm. Telling Juno to trust him.

There’s something kind of uncomfortable, seeing yourself from the outside, without the hot temper of the moment to justify your words. He must admit, though, it does seem like it proves Nureyev’s point. Juno doesn’t really treat Peter Nureyev like someone he’s in love with.

It’s just… complicated, he wants to tell them. But this is neither the time nor the place.

“Right. Well, for my disloyalty, I was taken prisoner when he was.”

“And you became closer during your time in the cells,” says Kovalyov, affecting boredom, though there’s something in his tone that suggests he’s listening, at least.

“Juno, tell Mister Kovalyov what Miasma had us doing while we were in there?”

Both men turn to him, and Juno’s mind reels. He doesn’t know what game Nureyev is playing, and he doesn’t know how not to ruin it for him. He takes a gamble, and goes with the truth, feeling like the clumsy follow in a dance he doesn’t know. Give a lady a chance, Nureyev.

“I read his mind. She made me practice activating the device by spending the days reading his mind.”

“That’s right,” says Nureyev, and Juno is briefly relieved, thinks he must have gotten it right. “I was the primary test subject for Juno’s powers. Miasma tested experimental Martian tech through, him, on me, for hours. She made him live inside my head for days on end. He knows about Mag, already, not because I told him- can you really imagine I’d ever do such a thing? But because he _saw_ it. While he was in my mind, he picked up entire snatches of memory.”

“Steel?” Growls Kovalyov. 

“I know the room where it happened was lit with red light,” says Juno, a little more confidently, now, searching for details that wouldn’t necessarily be part of the retelling, “I know the timer to the drop spoke in a woman’s voice.”

“But the problem with untested tech is that you never know quite what you’re going to get out of it. What comes along with all those memories. I don’t think even Miasma expected it, and I know Juno had no reason to. I don’t believe any of us knew I loved him, except me.”

Juno knows what Nurevey is going to say the heartbeat before it comes out of his mouth. He thinks he’s going to be sick.

“What do you know about Juno Steel? The police officer so principled he was thrown off the force. The reluctant hero of Hyperion City. It wasn’t his fault, of course, any more than it was really mine. We thought the feeling was mutual, and it wasn’t.”

Nureyev’s voice is clipped, and clear, and as precise and wounding as one of his knives.

“But how could Juno Steel ever love a thief and a murderer?”

It’s Juno’s turn to feel exactly as though he’s been slapped. Luckily Kovalyov hasn’t torn his gaze away from Peter’s expression, because Juno needs to get himself under control. Both their lives might count on it.

“It lasted one night. Not even that- just a few fragile hours, while his brain reeled with the aftereffects of everything in my head. We came here. We both believed we could be everything for each other. Then I fell asleep, and the curtain over his thoughts fell away. I woke up. He was gone.

“So you see, Kovalyov, we aren’t precisely _close._ I came back to Mars and went straight to Juno’s office to see if he was the one trying to kill me. It was a long shot. Juno is a little bit too honourable to ever be the knife in the dark, but it always pays to check. I assume he’s found a way around those particular convictions, given the stunt with his elevator?”

Juno wants, frantically, to object to every terrible part of this. Only the flat, furious way Nureyev is staring at him now keeps his mouth shut for him. He can’t ruin whatever this bid is just yet, not until it’s clear what Nureyev is doing.

Kovalyov knows full well, of course, that Juno wasn’t in on this plan, but he doesn’t necessarily know that Nureyev doesn’t have good reason to believe Juno is. So, maybe if he can convince him they’re on the same side. Maybe even get these ropes untied.

“I didn’t have anything to do with it, Nureyev,” Juno grinds out, “he never asked me. I don’t know what I’d have done if he had, but I’m sure not going to cry about it if he gets his way. It sounds like you’ve been running from your past from a long time, and now it’s finally caught up to you.”

“Well,” says Kovalyov, plainly shaken by this turn of events, “well, well. Mister Semkiu is calling, gentlemen, so I’ll ask you to stay patiently seated. I’ll only be a few minutes. Count on continuing this discussion.”

A few minutes is a few minutes more before he makes Peter into a corpse, and presumably Juno along with him, so it’s a start.

\---

The room is quiet for a long time, after that. Kovalyov leaves them alone together, but they have to assume they’re being watched. The videos behind them cycle now, between Duke and Dahlia, and Peter alone at the Dione. The real Peter, the one tied to the chair, looks somewhere between horribly brittle, fiercely dignified, and in total and utter shock.

Juno supposes it isn’t often that long lost brothers come crawling out of the woodwork to try to kill you.

“Can’t you slip those ropes?” He eventually grits out, on the fifth round of Peter sobbing his name on screen. 

“Not when they’re tied by someone who actually knows what they’re doing, Juno,” says Peter, mildly, “Mag trained the both of us. Or started to, anyway. Kovalyov seems to have learned just enough.”

There’s nothing he can possibly say to this, so he stares at him instead. That bruise has come in worse, ripened to an ugly purple. His glasses have slide a half inch down his nose, enough so that Peter tilts his head back and gives it a small shake, nudging them back into place before looking up again, and casting him a thin smile. It’s sarcastic, but with a self-deprecating edge Juno hasn’t seen from him before.

Juno wonders, all in a lurch of returning panic, if he believes what he said. Does Peter think Juno never really loved him? 

The thought hurts so badly that he almost blurts a declaration out now, their lives be damned. He’s probably going to get killed anyways, he doesn’t want to go to his death without Peter Nureyev knowing that he’s been the secret sun at the centre of Juno’s solar system almost since the moment they met.

He swallows hard and looks from Peter to the window. The balcony door is still open, and on a gust of wind, the curtains blow. It’s too much of a reminder of just how high up they are, and how difficult it is to prove a fall is murder. How much doctoring of that tape would it take to make it an open and shut case, as far as the HCPD was concerned?

He’s almost thankful when Kovalyov steps back into the room, and stops his thoughts running in circles.

The fact that Peter’s brother has a blaster in one hand and a knife in the other is inauspicious, but at least movement provides the possibility for opportunity.

“I’ve thought about what you said, Peter,” says Kovalyov, and he doesn’t come to Juno’s chair this time. He points the gun at him, yes, but crosses to Peter, to come first for the ropes at his ankles. He cuts them with the knife, somehow managing to keep the gun trained on Juno throughout, “and I’m afraid I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter whether or not you’re lying.”

“Oh?” Asks Peter, in the very still way he gets when he’s about to do something terrifying.

“You see, I don’t need to know whether or not Juno Steel really loves you. I genuinely hope he doesn’t, but it remains neither here nor there.”

“Seems like a pretty big difference to me, pal,” says Juno, who doesn’t like where this is going, and who wants to keep Reginald talking, keep him from looking up and noticing the steel coiled in Peter’s expression, how _ready_ he looks.

“Maybe. But either way, detective, Peter Nureyev loves _you._ Loves, not loved, or he wouldn’t be here, whispering sweet nothings in your ear during my auction. And while he still loves you, and while I’ve got this gun pointed at you, he’s going to do exactly what I say, or I’m going to-”

Kovalyov doesn’t get to finish the sentence. With both hands free, and with their bodies this close, the threat of a trained blaster isn’t nearly enough to stop Peter Nureyev when he’s angry. 

Cold and furious and avenging, Peter reaches out with a snap, has the blaster hand by the wrist, and is up out of the chair and heaving Kovalyov physically forward. A shot whistles past Juno’s ear so close he feels the heat singe his hair a little. By the time he can sort out what’s happened, it’s already all over.

Juno draws in a deep breath, and smells the burning, and that cologne, and then the blood, spurting arterial red out of Reginald’s throat and all over Peter’s hands and face and clothes. Edward Kovalyov gurgles once. 

He dies quicker than Mag did.

“Well,” says Peter, still sounding as though he’s speaking from a great distance away, “it wasn’t in the back, at least.”

As though knifing family is a skill that one improves over time. He frees the blade with a terrible, wet sound, and eases the body to the floor, rather than letting it drop.


	7. The Foundation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Juno handles the aftermath.

Kovalyov is dead. Juno doesn’t need to look twice to be sure of that. His body is going stiff. His eyes have that unmistakable flatness to them. 

Peter’s are quickly developing the close cousin thereof. Juno waits for him for a few stunned seconds more, before he realizes that he really isn’t moving, is on his knees on the carpet holding onto the twitching body of his adoptive, estranged brother. 

The guy has earned it, sure, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t got a few steps more before they can afford for him to slip into shock.

“Nureyev,” Juno says, and doesn’t get a response, not even a blink, “Hey. Peter!”

The other man looks up from the corpse and over at Juno, and shakes himself out of his daze, getting up to his feet and bringing the knife along with him, to see to those ropes.

Later, Peter will admit to Juno that he doesn’t remember a thing from the moment Kovalyov fell till the moment he sat down on the couch in Juno’s apartment. There are a lot of little details between the Dione and there- Juno calls Rita, then gets Peter into the bathroom and washes the blood off his face and hands and abandons the blood-stained shirt in the bottom of the tub along with several very ruined towels. 

They make quite a sight, going through the lobby together, soaking wet and Peter without a shirt under Juno’s too-small suit jacket. Luckily Rita has parked the car illegally on the curb out front and is chatting about the latest soaps with the HCPD officer who had presumably stopped to ticket her. She cuts away from the guy, hurrying up the steps to greet Juno and Nureyev, and to speak a moment out of earshot.

“Hey boss, I thought this shindig was supposed to be at the Titan?” she says, a little subdued by the way Juno is guiding Peter along. Something about the look on the thief’s face is enough to provoke a moment of sobriety out of even Rita, “Everything go okay?”

“Sure, Rita,” says Juno, “except there’s a dead body upstairs, and the police are gonna find out about it sooner or later.”

“Oh boy. I’ll grab the lieutenant over there and let him know.”

“Let him know there might even be footage of the whole thing in the security office.”

“Hotels like this aren’t supposed to film inside bedrooms, Mista Steel. That’s definitely against, like, six laws or something.”

“Well, you’d better call Captain Khan too, and give him the tip off. Maybe if you can get him to sink his teeth into that case, he’ll forgive us for the fact that Agent Glass here vanished before either you or I could stop him.”

“Sure thing, boss. You get your fella home now, and you be sure you stay with him, okay? He looks like he’s seen a ghost.”

She doesn’t know how right she is. Juno slips her credits to get herself a cab home and drives Peter off into the dark.

Peter isn’t doing well. He submits to being led up the stairs to Juno’s crummy apartment, and to being sat on the couch. Juno looks him over, and grits his teeth, trying to remember what he knows about what to do for shock. 

Juno breathes out a sigh and goes to put the kettle on, and digs out an extremely old, extremely dusty box of peppermint tea. In the kitchen, he takes a second to breathe, and to think about everything Peter said.

Is there any chance in the world that the way he feels about Peter are a side effect of the mind reading? At first blush he can look back and see how the time in Miasma’s cell brought the two of them closer, but the easy answer is _of course not._

Of course not, otherwise he wouldn’t have spent the last eight months aching for him. 

Of course not, or it wouldn’t have been so hard to walk out of the Dione that night. 

Of course not, or Juno would never have turned to putty for him from the second they kissed, that first time in his office, while Peter was probably picking his pocket for the keys to his safe.

Juno hadn’t even wanted to admit he loved him until Peter insisted out loud that he didn’t. At least his still deserves the award for most perversely oppositional lady on Mars.

Still, he’s going to go ahead and mentally chalk up Nureyev’s ‘telepathic side effect’ theory as verifiably false. The next question is whether _Peter_ believes what he said. Or, a treacherous little voice inside Juno points out, maybe the better question might be what does Peter feel about what happened, full stop.

What it must have been like, kneeling on that hotel room floor, in just a dirty bedsheet? His body still aching with everything they’d been through in the tomb, aching pleasantly from everything they’d done in that bed. What did Juno let him think, walking away without a word?

Juno’s been trying to drink and work long hours and periodically fuck, and anything else he can think of, just to beat that guilty little thought into submission. Usually when he does these things, the only person he manages to hurt is himself. He likes it that way. 

Obviously that isn’t at all what he managed to do here. He breathes out long and frustrated, and pours hot water over the teabag, only to jump at the sound of a voice behind him.

“Juno?”

Murmurs Peter, from the doorway, standing again, speaking again, which can only be a good thing. Juno puts down the put in a hurry, and turns to face him over his shoulder, while he goes for the sugar dish. It’s empty, of course, has been an afterthought in here since Juno moved in.

“Hey, you shouldn’t be up, I’m bringing you tea, I just- hang on, we need to get something sweet in you. I think I’ve got…”

“Please don’t, Juno,” says Peter, politely, “I don’t feel like eating. Is this your apartment?”

“Yes,” says Juno, procuring from a back pantry a hardened jar of honey. Sasha’d gotten it for him as a gift when they were still on speaking terms and she’d visit his apartment sometimes. Honey is _the only food in the galaxy that can’t spoil, Steel._ It has hardened, though, and he has to use a knife to saw out a corner of the stuff, then gets the chunk into the tea with the help of a couple of fingers, and uses the blade to spin the water to help it dissolve.

Peter watches this without commentary. His glasses are gone, but Juno can’t really tell whether he’s nearsighted or just having trouble focusing, period. The room is very quiet, except for the click of the knife against ceramic, while the lump of sweet dissolves. Sugar is good for shock, right?

“Come back to the livingroom,” he urges, fishing the teabag out and tossing it into the sink, then dropping the knife after it. He picks the teacup up and leaves the jar open on the counter behind him, crumbs of crystallized honey scattered in his wake.

\--

Around dawn, Peter finally starts talking. Juno is drowsing, half asleep, in the corner of the couch. Peter is holding the teacup obediently, though the liquid is quite untouched, and it’s long gone cold.

“I owe you several apologies,” starts Peter, so soft and formal that Juno can’t stand it.

“No.” He interjects, just sharply enough that Peter looks up. “I mean, yes, but no. Not the way you think.”

It’s now or never, he thinks. He can either shut up and let this slip away, and Peter, he’s sure, will allow it. Or he can do the right thing and tell the truth and give him the chance to make a choice.

“You shouldn’t ever have written me that first note.”

This obviously isn’t what Peter expects to hear, and for a heartbeat he looks so terribly stricken that Juno thinks he’ll crack and all the stress and misery of it all will come pouring out of him and he’ll actually cry. Part of him even thinks that’d be good, but the bigger part of him thinks he’ll never be able to finish saying this if he does.

“You dragged me into your attempt to double cross your boss and save the world. You were right, what you said on the security communicator. You decided about me right away, and you put your trust in me based on some kind of gut instinct that _I_ don’t have access to. So you did put your trust in me, and then you used that fact to leverage me into trusting you back when I wasn’t really ready right away to return the favour, but if I didn’t then I’d just be the jerk who wouldn’t return what I was being given. And then you _did_ prove yourself, and we went through this thing together, this huge, terrifying, life shattering thing, and I loved you so much.

“And no, it wasn’t some echo of what you were feeling. You know that’s garbage. Knock it off.” Since Peter is opening his mouth to say something. ‘Bedside manner’ might go on the list with ‘professionalism,’ things Juno really needs to work on getting better at.

“All right,” says Peter, reluctantly, “all right, I do know that. But the alternative isn’t very palatable either, Juno.”

No, Juno supposes it wouldn’t be. He remembers the intimacy of deciding to go back to that hotel together. Of going through everything together.

“I didn’t want to go. I loved you.” While Juno speaks, Peter’s mouth develops a somewhat disbelieving curl, so he says it again, blurts it out, even though it feels raw and terrible. “I _love_ you. I love you in a way I don’t entirely know how to cope with. I know your darkest secrets. I am not scared of your baggage. But I don’t know what your favourite colour is. I don’t know how you take your coffee. I don’t know your birthday, and I don’t know if you have any allergies. I don’t know if you leave the towel crumpled wet on the floor, or where your scars come from.

“You don’t know any of that about me, either. Or if you do it’s only because you broke into some dossier and looked it up. You don’t know that there’s absolutely zero chance that I can be the person you deserve. Hell, I don’t think I could even pull off being just the person I think I am, not for long enough for us to last.”

It’s badly unfair that Juno is the one crying after the day they've had. Mercifully Peter looks like he’s a little bit too much in a daze still to do or say anything about it. Juno scrubs at his face with the edge of a sleeve, and then his nose, and draws in a wet breath.

“And I kind of believe you’d be a lot better off if you could just get over me, too. That one day you’re going to catch on and figure it out for yourself. I _hate you_ for this, a lot of the time. Because living on this planet without you feels like it does when the oxygen processor breaks down, do you know that? And I love-”

Peter is on him before he finishes the ‘you.’

Juno is crying too hard to be particularly easy to kiss, and there’s cold peppermint tea all over both of them. But, Peter’s arms are strong and he pulls Juno into his lap and holds him tight, letting Juno crush in against his shoulder and sob for the both of them. If Peter’s expression is still a little glassy, mostly calm, well, Juno can feel the frantic beat of his heart in his throat and knows better.

“I can’t leave.” Whispers Juno, voice breaking. “I don’t believe in fairy tales. I don’t believe love conquers all. I will either get you killed, or you’ll live long enough to know me well enough to be disappointed.”

“Juno,” breathes Peter, into his hair, against his ear, “Juno, Juno.”

It isn’t a solution, or even a promise, but after that looping video it’s just so nice to hear Peter say his name kindly and gently. 

It’s a first step.

\---

Peter is in the bathroom when he shouts out suddenly;

“Juno!”

Juno drops the shattered pieces of the teacup right back onto the floor and comes running, finds Peter scrubbing frantically at a hitherto unnoticed bloodstain that’d been hiding under his jacket collar, along his throat.

“Hey,” says Juno, coming up behind him, taking his hands, and again, “hey there. Let’s take care of that, okay?”

So they shower together.

Nothing untoward happens. Peter has just murdered his brother and Juno feels emotionally flayed in his own right. It’s nice, though, to be naked together without expectation. Juno soaps him from top to bottom, kneeling down in the tub and making Peter hold the wall for balance and make muffled noises of complaint while Juno goes from head to literally between his toes.

It’s nice to fuss a little. They stand together under the spray, with Juno’s cheek against Peter’s throat, and Peter’s chin tucked on top of his head.

They fall into bed after sharing Juno’s single clean, very threadbare, towel.

\---

Juno wakes up and finds Peter gone.

He reaches out across the bed, feels the empty space next to him, and sits up with a pang of anxiety so intense it makes him physically nauseous. He gets up, and goes to the bedroom door, reaching for the bathrobe that lives on the hook on back of it. Genius detective that he is, he misses the clue that it’s gone, and is still in a bit of a panic when he stumbles out naked into the living room. 

He runs to check the front door. The chain is still thrown, bolted from the inside. Then, he hears a pantry door shut in the kitchen.

“Juno, I have found six things that could charitable be called ‘food items.’ Two of them are past their best before date, one by six years.” Calls Peter, in a sing song that sounds just like him.

Juno steps into the doorway, and takes in the sight of Peter Nureyev, dressed in Juno’s shabby terrycloth bathrobe, squinting down at a jar of jam, searching the label. He searches for the right height to hold it at and so answers Juno’s mental question from earlier about his glasses.

“Make that three out of date. Of the three remaining, _edible_ foods, one is mayonnaise and the other is soy sauce. So our breakfast options, my dear lady, are the house special ‘mayonnaise spread on bread,’ or perhaps you might prefer the seasonal offering of ‘soy sauce with bread dipped into it?’”

“There’s peanut butter in the cupboard over the stove.” Says Juno, so relieved he feels his eyes prickle, ever so slightly. “But we can go shopping.”

“Good. We’ll make a list. I’m terribly allergic to shellfish.” Peter glances up, shyly, almost. “Not that you were likely to propose prawns for breakfast, but I thought I might stay long enough to cook dinner.”

“Well.” Says Juno, voice cracking badly. “That sounds to me like a good first step.”

\---

Eventually Juno can’t delay any longer. He drops Peter off at the optometrist, then takes the car to go stop in at the station for that interview Khan had been bothering him for.

He knocks on the chief’s office door and finds himself smiling at the look of resigned exasperation that crosses the older man’s face.

“Steel.” He barks. “Close the door and sit.”

Juno obeys, waiting while Khan finishes reading one more paper, then lifts his eyebrows up when Khan sets his hands on the desk and breathes out another exasperated sigh.

“How’s Rita?” Khan eventually asks. 

“She’s good,” he answers “the agency’s closed for a couple more days, and I think she’s enjoying the time off.”

“Don’t stay shut too much longer. When you’re out of office for more than a week at a time she shows up here and starts streamlining things in the department. It’s done wonders for the effectiveness of the cybercrime team, and the new scheduling system is a lot more intuitive, but there’ve been three weddings so far- two of them between sworn lifelong enemies whose rivalries were both somehow secretly masking burning passion all along. If I make my wife sit through one more ceremony she’s going to kill me.”

That makes a lot of sense, and Juno gives him a grimace of genuine empathy. Khan just sighs again and gets down to business.

“When we got to the hotel, the room you were talking about, 706, was clean as a whistle. There was a construction crew in there, and the carpet had been lifted out. The whole bathroom reeked of bleach. A team of four workmen were on hand to swear on their little old grannies that they’d been working there for a month.”

“Huh.” Says Juno, blandly, eyebrows lifting just a little higher. 

“Seems like it might be bad for the image of a hotel group, if a dead body turned up in one of the rooms. And on the night of a big fancy important auction type event whose reputation they were carefully trying to preserve. I’m following up with this ‘Reginald Farrow,’ but they tell me he’s returned to Brahma to deal with a death in the family.”

“So… guess that’s that then?”

He’d been worried about whether Khan would want to investigate. He’s sure the other man wouldn’t press charges, but these things have a momentum of their own sometimes, and there’s no way Peter’s name wouldn’t appear all over the coroner’s report.

“Not quite.” Says Khan, and Juno feels his stomach sink. “We did a little follow up on the second half of your tip, the one about surveillance in hotel suites? A top-secret inquiry into the practice, not a word of it spoken to anyone outside of this office. Naturally I was called for comment by four different newspapers this afternoon alone.”

“Looks like things are going to get a little exciting for the Jupiter Group, in terms of that Martian expansion.”

“Be that as it may, there is the question of the surveillance camera footage from that night.”

“Ah.” Says Juno, and holds his breath, watching Khan watch him across his desk, from under bushy eyebrows. Hand an honest cop a recording of a murder, even one in self-defence, and what is he going to do with it?

Keep it in his desk, apparently. Khan opens the top drawer and draws out a few items. A cigar, a lighter, and last but not least, a small data card. He lights the cigar, which Juno is pretty sure you aren’t supposed to do, then sets the lighter on the edge of the desk, right next to the data card. 

Juno still doesn’t dare to breathe, not even as Khan turns away again, and heads to the window to adjust the blinds. Open, then closed. To the filing cabinet, where he putters. Back to the blinds, where he clears his throat, _extremely pointedly._

Juno is just about to ask whether there’s some way to switch his face for Peter Nureyev’s in the footage when Khan loses his patience and says, with considerable annoyance;

“It would certainly be a shame if the tape from that night were _destroyed_ because of some kind of inexplicable and sudden _heat damage_ , detective. But then again, what could the footage possible show other than a construction crew gutting a hotel room? Definitely not two young men who look like they’ve had quite enough excitement for one lifetime.”

His brain turns back on and he grabs the lighter and the card and works so fast he scalds his own fingertips. The prospect of a future prosecution bubbles away, and Khan snorts his approval, and tells Juno to get the heck out of his office.

Juno gets.

He’s still sucking his singed fingers when he makes it back to the apartment. Peter has beaten him home. There are a few shopping bags sitting on the coffee table, and a few items on the kitchen counter when he peeks in there. In the bathroom, there’s a new set of towels, a deep navy that feel luxurious to the touch- with two full sized ones, he can’t help but notice. Should two people care to shower at once.

His attention goes back to the coffee table, where in addition the shopping bags is a stack of papers, perhaps a hundred pages or so. Juno crosses over to them and has a look at the top few. Some are printed maps, some are text, long form explanations laid neatly down. All of it looks very freshly printed. 

Some of the pages already have handwritten notes scratched into them. One has a cat doodled on the corner- Juno knows how to spot the compound eyes now. Another has a small drawing eye, with thick eyelashes, and the trademark hatching around the iris that make it his own cybernetic implant. Peter is still not a very good drawer, and obviously thinks kind of improbable things about the thickness of Juno’s eyelashes. 

That’s neither here nor there. He doesn’t know what Peter ended up doing with the Aktinovolic Atlas, but whatever it was, he obviously took the time to make a copy for himself before he let it slip out of his hands.

He sets the pages down, and glances around the little apartment, which feels somehow cozier than it normally does. Someone has been sitting in his chair. Someone has been cooking in his kitchen. Very best of all, though, someone is sleeping in his bed.

Peter is back in Juno’s bathrobe, though there’s only a tiny corner of it poking out from under the duvet. His new glasses are sitting on the bedside table. Juno thinks they’re going to look very nice on him.

So Juno strips down to just his panties, and takes the other side of the bed, sliding in behind Peter and trying to insinuate himself into the tangle of tucked up blankets. By the time he’s burrowing up against Peter’s back until the other man is awake and laughing.

“Hello there,” says Peter, and makes a flail armed gesture, flinging his blanket tent open wide and scooping Juno in underneath it before too much warm air can escape. Peter and the duvet both fold over him, and Juno wraps his arms and legs up and around the other man, inviting him in against his chest with a pleased, tired sound. Peter settles down, breathing in deeply and letting it out just shakily enough that Juno suspects he’s been crying. Probably a good sign, in all honesty.

He strokes Peter’s hair back, musses through it with his fingertips, and then uses his toes to pull the blanket down just far enough that he can breathe from out of the top of it. Peter obstinately tucks it in under Juno’s shoulders, apparently not as inclined to need fresh air, or at least temporarily more interested in hiding than he is in oxygen. A nap feels like just the thing.

“My favourite colour is apricot,” says Peter, muffled, from deep under the blankets, and speaking against Juno’s skin. His breath tickles. Juno grins at his bedroom ceiling and feels himself start to dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU everyone for following along! This has been a slice.
> 
> This is also just the beginning. I've got most of the sequel written and being polished up in a word document, so if you want to see where it all goes, be sure to bookmark the series!


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